Billie Grace Lynn just won $25,000 to cross the country on the skeleton of a cow.

An associate professor in the University of Miami Art Department, Lynn took home the West Collection 2011 Grand Prize for her electric/hybrid Mad Cow Motorcycle, an “eight-foot by three-foot sculpture of cow bones, bicycle frame, and motor … outfitted with a Florida M A D C O W license plate, cowbell, and cupholder,” according to a U.M. press release.

Lynn outfits herself with an udder-shaped helmet, black leather jacket, and cowhide chaps when she takes the Mad Cow Motorcycle for a spin around Miami Beach (see video after the jump). Her goal with each ride is to get her bewildered bystanders to go vegetarian or at least to eat less meat.

“I want people to think about their meat consumption,” Lynn says in the release. “Most people don’t go into an art gallery or think about stuff like this, so it’s good to get out into the world and have conversations.”

It may seem incongruous for Lynn to preach meatlessness while straddling an array of bleached animal bones, but she apparently salvaged the skeleton from a Florida field after a cow had been shot in the skull while struggling to give birth.

With her prize money, Lynn plans to turn the Mad Cow Motorcycle into a biodiesel-powered machine and tour the beef industry states across the country, educating people about cruelty to animals and the greenhouse gases generated by commercial cattle farms along the way.